Coming to DVD today, Tuesday, May 28: A GOOD DAY TO DIE
David Mueller and Lynn Salt’s portrait of Dennis Banks and the American Indian Movement made its debut at deadCENTER in 2010, where it won best documentary. It went on to screen at Denver, Cork, Hot Springs, imagineNATIVE, and the San Francisco American Indian festivals, among others.
Banks is one of the founders and leaders of the late 1960s-1970s activist organization AIM, a Native American advocacy group borne out of frustration with authorities and the non-responsiveness of the federal government Bureau of Indian Affairs. Mueller and Salt focus to a large extent on Banks’ life, which mirrored the experiences of many Native Americans of his generation – forced separation from family, community, and language at Native boarding schools; government-supported assimilation into cities via the Indian Relocation Program; military service; and jail – the latter a product of discriminatory and often hostile policing. While incarcerated, Banks and fellow Native prisoners educated themselves via the prison library, learning of the strides made through activism around civil rights, women’s rights, and the anti-war movement, and becoming politicized in turn, forming AIM. Banks and associates relate a number of AIM’s key actions, such as the taking over of Mt Rushmore and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, neither of which employed Natives; several protests around the murders and cover-ups of Native people, including a march on Custer SD that gives the doc its title; and the infamous standoff at Wounded Knee, which sent Banks into hiding for nearly a decade, and effecitvely led to the shut down of AIM. Expertly blending interviews with ample archival material, Mueller and Salt provide an engrossing overview of the modern history of Native American activism that is sadly probably not as well known as it should be.
what (not) to doc 